[Sigia-l] Jared Spool's article on galleries

[Mike.Steckel at SEMATECH.Org]

Olly, first I want to thank you for your reply to Jared. It took some
courage to lay this out and ask for responses. I would love to see this
list include discussions of more real world examples like this.

I have many responses to your post, but will only outline a few:

1. This is a great example of why we need to be closer to marketing. One
of the problems here is that there are too many similar phones being
offered. OK so maybe you can't do much about that now.

2. I am not convinced that categorizing phones is "right out." One of my
struggles in determining acceptable labels is reconciling how you are at
the same time describing "mid-range" and "high end" phones while also
saying that "Almost all phones have key features a consumer is
interested in." There must be some distinguishing features. "Simple"
phones (low cost, the basics) and "Staying Connected" phones (messaging,
wi-fi, etc.) are the only two I can pull out of your message, but there
are probably some in-between. Some sort of faceted approach would almost
certainly help you here, but I would need to know more. 

People want to know that the phone can do for them. You are describing
features from a technical standpoint (MB and RAM for instance), but you
should consider the iPod example you mention of "1000 songs in your
pocket" -- I get that because I know what this choice does for me.
Categorize around what this phone can do for me. Playing with this might
help you convince people that consumers are having trouble picking among
the various phones (back to #1). 

3. I am interested in hearing more about how you determined that how the
phone looks is the primary driver. I would assume that people might use
this criteria after they have narrowed down their choices to a few that
appear to be similar. 

4. On the site itself, one of the features I would be interested in is
the size of the phone. It is difficult to tell how big the phones are
from the graphics.

My initial thoughts, thanks again for posting!

-- Mike Steckel